Today was the final day for any submissions to the Enchanted Objects Design Challenge. As well as completing our projects we were tasked with blogging about the challenge on the community website, hence why you’ve not heard more about it here.

My project, the “Enchanted Cottage” was to take a “wetter haus” and add “enchantment” by swapping in a new mechanism and electronics. The weather is read from the Internet and the people move to tell you if it will be rainy or sunny. The LED shows the temperature as a simple colour, cold is blue, red is hot, if it’s white then watch out it could be icy.

The mechanics were replaced with a system based on the Watt’s Linkage to make the movement linear rather than arcing as in the traditional approach. The figures were fitted with magnets so that they could move without any obvious form of propulsion.

The electronics were based on an Arduino Yún, custom prototyping shield and an Infineon RGB LED driver shield. The whole thing is powered by a rechargable LiPo battery and a module from AdaFruit. Because the Arduino was deep in the middle of the house, I used fibre optics to bring the light to the top panel. A sensor was added into the roof so you could simply tap it to get it to update the forecast for you.